When Google wanted to get into the game of selling social ads across all platforms, it decided to acquire Wildfire, a company that had the market on lockdown. Since the acquisition last July, little has changed as far as what Wildfire offered, how it offered it and there was little to no impact for current customers.

Today, the Wildfire team has announced that its first major shift is upon us, cutting off standalone campaigns that were a hallmark of its tiered offerings.

Here’s what the team had to say about the “new direction”:

…We’ve decided that we’ll be retiring our Basic, Standard, and Premium promotions after June 30th. We’ll continue to offer promotions as part of our Social Marketing Suite. We understand that some of you will still want to run standalone promotions, so we’re glad to know that there are other companies dedicated to helping you do this. But we’ll be sad to see you go. Of course, we’d love for you to stay in the Wildfire and Google family, so if you want to learn more about the Wildfire Suite, then please give us a call at 888-274-0929.

Basically, Google now wants you to purchase the full suite, which starts at $2,500 a month, according to a member of the Wildfire team in the comment section of its post. The suite allows you to push unlimited promotions, pages and messages. If you still want to do standalone social marketing campaigns, the company is now suggesting that you take your business elsewhere. Where else can you go? Well, Google and Wildfire aren’t endorsing any one service, but suggest that you give them a call with any questions that you might have. Which sounds like a setup for a sales call about their “Suite.”

If you’re already set up to do standalone campaigns under its Basic, Standard or Premium accounts, you can run them until June 30th. If you had planned a campaign that runs past that time, you’re out of luck and better find another service or pay up for the Suite. Luckily, all of the leads that you’ve collected using Wildfire can be exported, and if you’re running on a Basic account, they’ll upgrade you so that you have access to the export feature. That’s nice.

The post itself ends on a nice note, thanking its customers for believing in them. The last sentence, however, makes it sound like Wildfire is ready for people to exit and go elsewhere: “We hope you choose to continue to work with us in the future.” Some had feared that something like this would happen as Google rolls Wildfire’s offering into its own services, but on the bright side, it’s a huge opportunity for smaller companies. Current Wildfire clients aren’t so happy thus far, according to some of the comments:

Nice doing business with you over the past few years and congrats on becoming part of a large and successful multinational corporation. We’ll be with your competition where a-la-carte pricing is still the norm, but if you ever reverse this policy you know where to find us. Been great.

Two services, Votigo and Offerpop, have already reached out to us to claim any wayward Wildfire clients. Know of any others? Share them in the comments.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

After buying social marketer Wildfire for $350 million, Google wants to ensure it keeps earning money and the employees don’t bail. That’s why Google set up $100 million in earn-outs and retention bonuses, multiple sources confirm. One, an investor I spoke to directly, verified the $350 million price tag we published last week and that the golden handcuffs amount to $100 million, twice the $50 million we and others expected.

The $450 million should be enough to inspire Wildfire’s daring founders Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard to keep leading the 400 employee team who love them. With fat-wallet enterprise giants Salesforce and Oracle having bought the startup’s rivals, the bountiful bonuses should prevent Wildfirers from straying to competitors or seeking new adventures in startup-land.

Google’s investment is especially wise, as over the years I’ve seen several acquisitions in the marketing space end with founders or clutch employees sailing off soon after deals close.

While there’s certainly satisfaction in helping another business reach its customers, especially when you’re independent, marketing doesn’t quite have the same philosophical pull as bold ideas in communication, cleantech, healthtech, or education. Plus there’s always a hot new startup with a puzzle to solve, or one’s own crackpot idea to take a chance on. Wildfire’s employees were a flight risk.

By combining some extra dollars on the horizon with Google’s notorious perks and the chance to apply the juggernaut’s resources, Mountain View could make sure those it acquired serve their time. And more than that. The retention plan isn’t just stock that will vest over years, but bonuses earned for hustle.

Ransom and Chuard originally started Wildfire as a week-long side project to market their travel company Access Trips. Largely on their own for a while, they eventually grew the startup through a tiny seed grant from fbFund into a heavyweight of cross-platform social promotion. So congrats to the Wildfire team for creating a company so valuable Google didn’t just buy you out, it built you in.

You can tell how strong the company’s culture is and how important it is to keep the founders around from this video showing the heartfelt presentation that announced the acquisition to the Wildfire team:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Wildfire, just acquired by Google, isn’t a social ads company. It relies on its partner Adaptly for access to ads APIs for Facebook and other sites. That means Google may buy Adaptly or another ads company any minute now. Otherwise Google will have to split the profits of social ads Wildfire will continue to sell through Adaptly.

As Facebook Sponsored Stories and Twitter’s promoted products are taking off, being the middleman between brands and social networks is become quite lucrative and its only sensible that Google would want to own a social ads API tool and/or service.

Optimizing social ads so they reach the right people for the lowest cost is not easy. It requires membership in exclusive API programs and serious engineering work to dynamically alter bids to get the lowest CPMs, CPCs, or Cost Per Actions (such as buying a new Facebook fan).

In exchange for full-managed spend service or self-serve tools, brands typically pay social ads API providers a percentage of their total spend — often around 10% to 20% depending on volume of spend. Otherwise they pay for performance, saying “here’s $1 million, buy me 500,000 Facebook fans”, and the ads provider gets to keep the margin. As brands shift spend from television, print, ad networks, and search to social, these services and software have become a huge business spawning dozens of startups.

Right now, Google largely targets ads based on what users are searching for and what other sites they’ve visited. But it knows that social networks offer rich, accurate ad targeting data, such as the age, gender, and interests of their users. Google’s ads business funds all its other innovations, and if ads are going social, that’s where its going too.

Other big enterprise marketing companies and smaller social Page management companies have seen the writing on the wall too. That’s why there’s been rapid consolidation in the space lately, with Buddy Media buying Brighter Option which prepped it to be acquired by Salesforce, Syncapse buying Clickable, and Adobe purchasing Efficient Frontier this year.

Still there are plenty of potential Ads API acquisition targets for Google:

• Adaptly is one of the most versatile social ads providers, powering sales on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and YouTube. It’s raised $13.2 million so it’s certainly not too big to buy.
• TBG Digital is a top players in Facebook ads, and we’ve learned it recently turned down an acquisition bid because buyer wouldn’t pay enough. With Google’s deep pockets, it could surely get the deal signed if it wanted to.
• Nanigans has grown into a Facebook Ads API powerhouse as well, possibly the largest, expanding from its original focus on game developers to serve premier brands like American Express and T-Mobile. Today it revealed to me that it manages nine-figures of Facebook Ad spend annually and has been serving an average of over two billion impressions per day this last month. It’s only raised $3 million so it could be an easy pick-up for Google.
• Optim.al offers Facebook ads expertise but is also creating a deep store of data. Considering Google+ is partly a big social data grab designed to power more relevant ads, Optim.al could mesh well with Google’s objectives.

Wildfire offers tons of value in page management, app development, and analytics, but ad sales is a huge revenue driver. If Google doesn’t buy a social ads company, it shows the Wildfire purchase was really about understanding social marketing and slipping inside Facebook and Twitter’s business models.

But I’d bet Google does buy into social ads. This validates Facebook’s long term revenue plans, and indicate the future of is advertising isn’t about pimping your own products, but showing people their friends already use them.

–

For more on Google’s acquisition of Wildfire, read: “Google Acquires Wildfire, Will Now Sell Facebook And Twitter Marketing Services“

I’ll also be discussing the aggressive M&A around social ads this Friday with Facebook’s VP of ads engineering Greg Badros at TechCrunch’s Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp in the Bay Area. There’s still a few last tickets available.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google today announced that it agreed to acquire Wildfire Interactive, a social media marketing software company that is a popular solution for managing pages and apps across platforms.

Terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but AllThingsD reports that it could be around $250 million, plus earnouts and employment agreements. Wildfire was widely expected to be acquired this summer, after other major players in the space — Buddy Media, Vitrue, Involver — were also bought.

Wildfire is a member of Facebook’s Preferred Marketer Developer program, certified in pages, apps and insights. Co-founders Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard started the company four years ago focused on building apps for sweepstakes, user-generated contests, quizzes, coupons and incentive-based surveys. In 2011, Wildfire broadened its service offering to include page management and monitoring tools. Besides Facebook management, the platform now allows marketers to manage Google+, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn. The company serves clients including Virgin, Cirque du Soleil, Gilt Group and Spotify. It also helps build apps for Facebook’s own use, including the voting app it used for its proposed policy changes earlier this year.

Google was reportedly interested in Buddy Media, but that company sold to Salesforce. Now with Wildfire, Google gets a popular platform and large sales team. Unlike Buddy Media, Wildfire doesn’t have access to the Facebook Ads API, but it’s unclear to what degree Google was interested in that aspect of the platform. Wildfire works with Adaptly to provide social advertising services for its clients.

In an announcement about the acquisition, Google wrote:

In a complex and changing landscape, businesses want to manage and measure these efforts in an integrated way. We’ve been working towards this end for some time. For example, Google Analytics helps businesses measure the contribution of hundreds of social sites; our Admeld service has helped to serve ads in Facebook developers’ social apps; and our DoubleClick platform enables clients to run and measure ads across social websites. On Google+, brands use services like Vitrue, Buddy Media and others to manage their pages, with many more to come.

With Wildfire, we’re looking forward to creating new opportunities for our clients to engage with people across all social services. We believe that better content and more seamless solutions will help unlock the full potential of the web for people and businesses.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Google has just bought social marketing software developer Wildfire, which lets brands serve marketing and ad campaigns on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and LinkedIn. Wildfire has grown to 400 employees over the last four years and now serves 16,000 customers. Several sources and blogs say the sale price was around $250 million

The acquisition will allow Google to provide advanced software and services to brands who want to run contests, sweepstakes, branded games and more on Google+. Wildfire will still operate as a marketing tool for brands on Google’s competing platforms, including Facebook, putting the search giant in a curious position where it earns money on the success of its rivals.

Google bid on buying Buddy Media but lost the deal to Salesforce. With Oracle buying other social marketing leaders Vitrue and Involver, Wildfire was the last top-tier startup in the space. Today’s deal leaves ThisMoment, another popular marketing platform, as a possible buy for old-world enterprise juggernauts like IBM or SAP.

Now it’s successfully bought one of Facebook’s biggest marketing partners. But Google hasn’t directly entered the social ad space yet. Wildfire only offers ad buying through a partnership with startup Adaptly.

Wildfire claims there will be no disruption or immediate changes to the service it offers, which includes ad buying (via Adaptly), feed publishing, Page management, social app and contest development, analytics, social monitoring:

“We remain focused on helping brands run and measure their social engagement and ad campaigns across the entire web and across all social services — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn and more — and to deliver rich and satisfying experiences for their consumers. To this end, Wildfire will operate as usual, and there will be no changes to our service and support for our customers.

That puts Google in an odd spot, where it will benefit if social networks such as Facebook and Twitter rise in popularity amongst brands. This hedges it against failure of Google+ as play to gain ad-targetable social data, but could heat up the on-going API battles between the top social platforms.

What if Facebook denied Wildfire API access? That could sting Google but it’s unlikely as it would send a shockwave through Facebook’s developer ecosystem. Facebook may have to grit its teeth and watch Google cash in on brands trying to infiltrate the news feed and its mobile apps. Though since it decides who gets early access to new features that can attract clients, Facebook could subtlety hurt Wildfire by favoring its competitors.

Wildfire will help handle owned marketing, such as handling Pages and other properties brands control, to complement Google’s DoubleClick AdX/Admeld paid marketing service for buying ads on search and other websites. The acquisition shows that Google understands that ads can’t do it all. Tons of brand spend is going towards managing their presences on social networks, and now it will get a slice of that pie too.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

HTC’s high-end efforts have garnered plenty of love lately (and rightfully so, I think), but devices like the once-mysterious HTC Golf prove that the company isn’t through churning out lower-tier handsets.

The Ice Cream Sandwich-powered Golf’s existence was first revealed a few months ago when a not-terribly-great picture taken with its five-megapixel rear camera started making the rounds, but no one had any idea what the actual device would look like. Naturally, Team PocketNow did their thing and managed to get their hands on what they claim is the first press image of the device.

Despite being a lower-end device, the Golf — which may soon be renamed the Wildfire C — seems to retain some of the design DNA seen in its flashier One series brothers, with a white frame that’s quite reminiscent of the top-tier One X. While it certainly seems handsome enough on the outside, the internals may leave a little to be desired — PocketNow’s sources reaffirm earlier claims that the Golf will ship with a single core processor clocked under 1GHz, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of internal storage.

Like many of HTC’s recent handsets, the Golf will also come equipped with the Beats Audio profile though at this point the special headphones are probably out of the question. As an Ice Cream Sandwich device running HTC’s Sense 4.0 UI though, the little guy is also privy to a few special treats, namely the 25GB of free Dropbox storage.

The spec sheet is decidedly of last year’s vintage, but HTC is playing it smart with this little guy. As the HTC buffs among you may know, the company announced their intention to focus on “hero” devices this year, and Golf/Wildfire C is poised to be a worthy successor to HTC’s popular line of low-cost, low-spec Wildfire handsets.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

On March 1st Facebook let the world feast its eyes on Timeline for Pages, and tomorrow after a month of voluntary migration it will force all Pages to switch to the redesign. But don’t worry,  it doesn’t significantly impact the rate of new Page Likes, and 95% of Pages who’ve switched have seen more Likes of their posts and people talking about them according to a study that social marketing platform Wildfire gave TechCrunch an early look at. Only megabrands with over 10 million Likes have seen reduced engagement, but this was in part due to a lull following press exposure during the Timeline launch.

There’s more good news for smaller Pages. A study shared with us by enterprise marketing platform Hearsay Social shows local business Pages with fewer fans get 5x more exposure in the news feed, and 8x more of the fans reached will engage with a post. That means big brands with lots of local branches can get 40x the engagement by having a Page for each store.

In the first week after Timeline for Pages launched 8 million Pages voluntarily switched over, but limited early data showed the migration significantly reduced the rate at which big pages were gaining fans. But data from Wildfire’s much more comprehensive study of 43 brands had rosier results.

First, fan growth rate was only down between 0.02% and 0.06%, which is essentially insignificant. That’s no win for Facebook’s design team but at least growth didn’t plummet. Small Pages with under 1 million fans are seeing engagement soar. People Talking About This, a measure of total mentions of a brand, is up 67.4%, comments per post is up 40%, and Likes Per Post is up 60.3%. Middle to large Pages with 1 million to 10 million fans are also doing alright with PTAT up 28.858, Likes per post up 13.56%, though comments per post is down 17.43%.

[Update: As some of our commenters have noted, the switch to Timeline shouldn't necessarily have such a big impact on the engagement with posts which are predominantly viewed through the news feed. There are few possible reasons for this. 1. Facebook may have artificially ratcheted up the news feed visibility of Pages who've switched. 2. The launch of Timeline for Pages may have led businesses to concentrate more on Facebook marketing and publish higher quality posts. 3. Those users visiting Page Timelines may be leaving significantly more Likes and remember the Page more leading to additional mentions.]

Megabrand Pages with over 10 million fans  (think Michael Jackson, Coca Cola, Disney, and MTV) faired worse after Timeline. PTAT was down 13.72%, comments per post down 16.72%, and Likes per post down 11.57%. This data was confounded, though, as all 7 of these Pages that Wildfire studied were promoted by Facebook in press around the launch of Timeline, and saw rapid returns to pre-press engagement levels that looked like declines. So most Pages should be excited about the new Timeline features, which Wildfire will be reviewing in a webinar at 10am PST today. (Update: You can now also download the full report in exchange for an email address).

As for the study commissioned by Hearsay Social from independent researcher Mainstay Salire (Update: now publicly available for download in exchange for an email address and there’s also a blog post of insights and an infographic), the 40x value of local fans should alter the Facebook marketing strategy of brands with locations around the US or the world.

Hearsay Social’s CEO Clara Shih tells me Having a massive, multi-million fan count “might be good bragging rights, but from a fan’s perspective they’re not as special, they’re just one of millions rather than part of a personalized community.” If brands willing to invest the time and money to manage all their local Pages it can give directly boost to their business. That’s because some of that 8x engagement comes from more link clicks to ecommerce sites that drive social marketing ROI.

What should brands with just one big Page do now? Hunt down unofficial Pages that represent their local stores and either claim them or have them shut down, then start official ones. Hearsay’s Rogue Page Finder can help. Then establish local admins for each Page or use a corporate/local-focused Page management software like Hearsay Social to syndicate updates from your main brand Page to that of each store.

Timeline and managing local Pages sure doesn’t make Facebook marketing any easier, but it does make it more effective. For these reasons, expect the Page management software industry and importance of trained community managers to keep growing.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Through the hard-fought battle to represent the world’s top brands, social marketing platform Wildfire has stayed quiet. But today, it revealed to TechCrunch that it has 13,000 paying customers, more than any company in the space, and has grown from 7 to 300 employees since the start of 2010, making it as big as industry giant Buddy Media. It’s now ranked in the top 1% on the Glass Door chart of best places to work, and we estimate it’s 2011 revenues were between $35 and $45 million.

While 13,000 customers sounds impressive, many of those are low-paying monthly campaign clients. To shift more to its lucrative full social media marketing suite, Wildfire has just hired a new CMO Doug Laird, formerly of QlikTech, SAP, Siebel, and Oracle.

Wildfire’s business is helping brands market through Facebook, as well as Twitter and LinkedIn. Founded in 2008, it focused on conducting Facebook contests and sweepstakes for years, but in 2010 raised a $4 million Series A and in 2011 launched a multi-function marketing suite with bigger profit potential.

2011 turned out to be a breakout year for Wildfire:

• It grew revenue by 300 percent in 2011 while reportedly keeping margins high
• International business grew 500% to become 24% of the company’s revenue
• 30 of the world’s 50 most valuable brands are now customers, including Electronic Arts, Facebook, Sony, Virgin Atlantic, Target, and Amazon
• It signed 300 new subscription clients in the last 6 months of 2011
• It’s powered 200,000 marketing campaigns to date

Wildfire calls itself “The World’s Largest Provider of Social Media Marketing Solutions” but that depends how you look at it. It’s tied with rival Buddy Media in employee count, and likely made slightly less in revenue during 2011. Buddy Media also has 900 subscription customers that pay for huge, year-long contracts.

Wildfire has built a substantial customer base but now needs to figure out how to monetize them better. It doesn’t own a Facebook ads platform — it partners with one instead, excluding it from scoring big margins on the huge Facebook ad campaigns brands buy. It also has to convince customers that it can do more than just contests, or it could be left to subsist on campaigns that bring in just $250 a pop and $5 a day.

There’s room for several big players in the social marketing space, and by not raising too much money Wildfire keeps itself an acquisition target. The question now is whether to fight it out in the crowded space amongst Buddy Media, Vitrue, Involver, and others, or sell to an old world marketing company that missed the boat on social.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Looks like things are going well over in Taiwan, as HTC has reported record-breaking Q2 results this morning. In fact, the company sold 12.1 million units in the second quarter totaling a 123.7 percent year-over-year growth rate. After Q2 taxes, that brings YOY growth to 102.9 percent. If you aren’t good with percentages, that’s huge. In terms of quarterly growth, HTC is up 24.8 percent from the first quarter.

A solid chunk of this can be attributed to China, which was HTC’s “standout” market. Entry-level models such as the Wildfire S, Salsa, and ChaCha (a.k.a. AT&T’s Status Facebook phone) also made an impact by broadening HTC’s portfolio. Of course, the Sensation and the Evo 3D certainly did their part, as well.

As I said earlier, HTC’s on a roll. Unfortunately, Apple wants to be one massive roadblock in the company’s path to success. Apple recently won over the judge after requesting an ITC import ban on HTC products. This could certainly hurt HTC, although the Taiwanese company has definitely put forth an effort to protect itself where patents are concerned.

The $300 million it spent picking up S3 graphics certainly beefed up its portfolio by 235 patents (and patent applications) to be exact. But there’s no telling whether or not Apple will trip up HTC as this legal tussle moves forward.

Estimated projections for next quarter don’t stray too far from the growth the company’s seen during Q2. HTC expects to ship 13.5 million units, which would represent 98 percent growth year over year. If all goes as planned, that’s a net revenue of $137 billion next quarter alone.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Promotion app developer Wildfire is broadening its service offering with the release of its new Social Marketing Suite. In addition to its Promotion Builder, Social Marketing Suite clients will have access to Page Manager for creating Pages and custom apps, Messenger for scheduling posts and monitoring mentions, and Dashboard for tracking performance analytics.

WildFire will now be competing in the relatively crowded Page management space with established, well-funded companies including Buddy Media, Involver, Vitrue, and Syncapse. Though its Promotion Builder clients will no longer have to look elsewhere for Page management, WildFire will have to work hard to retain its best-in-class distinction for contests as it assigns resources to its new products.

An Acquisition Target?

Wildfire was founded in 2008 and has only taken $4.1 million in funding since. The company saw that brands needed promotion and engagement apps to draw users to their Page and attain Likes, so it built a suite of app templates including sweepstakes, contest coupons, group deals, and quizzes. While other companies needed much more funding to build out a wide range of products, Wildfire concentrated on its core competency, now powering 100,000 promotions and only releasing a social media monitoring tool late last year so brands could track the success of their promotions.

Now the industry is consolidating with older internet companies and Ads API services acquiring Page management companies. We also see some middle market Page management services becoming commodified as satisfactory free tools proliferate and Facebook provides more native Page administration functionality, including moderation. Therefore, Wildfire’s service offering expansion could be an attempt to position itself for acquisition. Otherwise it will have to leverage its existing Promotion Builder client base to pull top brands away from the other Page management companies.

Regarding the consolidation, Wildfire co-founder and CEO Victoria Ransom tells us “there’s no doubt that will continue. Social media marketing is a revolution, and there will be other big companies looking to get into it.” She says appearing attractive to acquirers hasn’t been a focus, and that the company ” has its head down, executing on the business”, growing from 10 employees to 120 since the beginning of 2010 mostly through investing profits.

The combination of a comprehensive service offering and little funding could make Wildfire an easy Facebook play by older email and internet marketing companies looking to instantly break into Facebook marketing without spending as much as when Efficient Frontier bought Context Optional for $50 million.

Social Marketing Suite Features

Wildfire’s Social Marketing Suite builds on its existing Promotion builder and integrates its monitoring too. None of the features seem especially unique, but they cover the essentials.

Page Manager lets clients build custom landing tabs and Facebook Page tab applications that host contests and other engagement mechanisms. Brands can also install plug-and-play pre-made applications. The tool also allows for easy localization of Pages for different languages.

Messenger tracks what users are saying about a brand and allows them to respond to generate good will and tend to customer service issues. Page updates and responses can be scheduled for maximum visibility and streamlining of work flow. Similar to HearSay Social, Messenger supports a corporate/local structure by allowing updates to be deployed to multiple Pages. For instance, the corporate branch of an insurance company could design a promotion and write updates that comply with industry regulations, and then have the updates posted by each of the Pages representing the companies local branches.

Dashboard provides standard social media marketing analytics as well as tracking the spread of viral campaigns from “views to entries, shares, invites, and conversions” says Ransom. Brands can also compare their performance against competitors thanks to data on 30 million Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts that Wildfire collects.

Ransom tells us that clients will still be able to pay for Promotion Builder on a per promotion basis. The Social Marketing Suite will be subscription based, though, allowing unlimited promotions and use of features. At first, only higher tiered plans with robust customizability will be available, costing in the low thousands per month, but plans in the low hundreds per month will eventually launch.

Powerful promotional apps are still something many brands are willing to pay thousands a month, but some of the other features available in Social Marketing Suite can attained for free or cheap from other third-party providers. Wildfire will need to upsell its current clients on why unified suite is the best choice for them, or it risks diluting its focus without enough reward.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook